Activity based costing (ABC) is a new age accounting system developed to overcome the limitations of traditional costing system, which in today’s technologically advanced world has lost its ability to provide accurate and useful cost information often required in taking various managerial decisions, like setting of selling price, ascertaining profitability of products as well as customers, taking a make or buy decision, eliminating the non-beneficial activities, and rewarding the employees. In this paper, an ABC model is developed for a government hospital in the state of Bihar in India to quantify its various public health related services. Although, there are limited published research papers related to application of ABC model in a specific department or method of a healthcare system, none of them has investigated its scope for organization-wide implementation. The results obtained from the developed ABC model in the public hospital would provide more comprehensive and accurate cost information, and radically contribute to the hospital administration in effective planning, controlling and decision making. This paper also elucidates about various obstructions and difficulties encountered during the implementation phase of ABC model in an Indian healthcare setting.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems track and measure marketing campaigns over different networks. There are literally many studies associated with the implementation of CRM in different industries. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine effective factors influencing on the success of CRM implementation. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale on measuring various factors and distributes it among selected employees who work for the biggest software maker firm in city of Tehran, Iran. Using principal component analysis, the study has detected five factors influencing on the succes of CRM including customer relationship technologies, customer oriented, enterprise development strategies, customer services and business plan.

Procurement risks analysis is a crucial study in supply chain risk management. According to the phenomenon of snow ball effect, if a risk occurs at the primitive node between buyer and supplier, it will be strengthened and extended throughout the entire network. Hence, it can have more disruptive influences comparing with risks that happen in further nodes. In this paper, through a case study, the most important risk factors and its multi-dimensional consequences in procurement risk analysis is derived from the literature review and implementing a Delphi method that takes into account the nine risks factors and 39 preliminary variables as risk consequences. The nine risk factors are limits of global communication, packaging and transportation, procedures and standards, sanction, supply of equipment, price of equipment, Communication, management of technology and delivery mistakes.

During the past few years, operations research applications in health care operation management have grown quickly. On the other hand blood as a perishable, valuable and lifesaving product is one important asset of any healthcare center. Therefore, designing a blood supply network comes to importance. It also should be noted that a blood supply chain comprises specific modifications. This study intends to locate blood bank components in a network, and to determine the allocations among the network components. The supply chain components considered in this study are donation sites, testing and processing labs, blood banks, and demand points. It is known that demand centers such as hospitals and clinics highly depend on blood products and any deficiency in procurement can even result in a person’s death. Thus, in the last layer of the considered network a transshipment sub-network is considered between demand points. Most of the intricacies in problem formulation of blood supply chain are regarded in this study; cases such as blood wastage, blood product decomposition in lab facilities, and transshipments between demand points. Due to the fact that for such an important and lifesaving supply chain the aim would go beyond minimizing cost, another objective function is presented for the problem. Hence, to obtain a Pareto solution for both objective functions ?-constraint method is utilized. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the problem, the model is implemented on a number of problem sets.

For today’s high competitive market, when immensity purchasing of inventory becomes convenient or obligatory, to discover an alternative market in order to maximize the revenue earned is a tradition. In this paper, we considered an inventory model for seasonal products with Weibull rate of deterioration having two potential markets, say, primary and alternate. To handle the inventory up to the next season will result an increase in total cost. So it is a favorable task to transfer the remaining stock to the alternate market even at a slightly differ in selling price. Solution procedure, numerical examples and sensitivity analysis for different variables are presented to illustrate the model.

This paper presents a supply chain management by considering efficiency in the system. The proposed study considers two objective functions where the first one maximizes the efficiency of the supply chain and the second one minimizes the cost of facility layout as well as production of different products. In order to measure the relative efficiency, the study uses the method developed by Klimberg and Ratick (2008) [Klimberg, R. K., & Ratick, S. J. (2008). Modeling data envelopment analysis (DEA) efficient location/allocation decisions. Computers & Operations Research, 35(2), 457-474.]. The study has been formulated as a mixed integer programming and the implementation of the proposed model has been demonstrated using some numerical example. The preliminary results indicate that it was possible to increase the efficiency of supply chain without increase the supply chain expenses.

This paper derives a deterministic inventory model for deteriorating items with inventory dependent demand rate. This study develops an order level inventory model with single warehouse where shortages are allowed and it is completely backlogged. The planning horizon is finite. This paper shows that there exists a unique optimal cycle time to minimize the total inventory cost per cycle. Truncated Taylor’s series expansion is used for finding closed form optimal cycle time, optimal time to finish positive inventory and optimal total inventory cost per cycle. The numerical example is given to validate the proposed model. The sensitivity analysis of the solution with the changes of the values of parameters associated with the model has also been discussed.

The improvement in manufacturing process is never ending effort, which is being derived by the culture of the organization. Therefore, an attitude of perfection, innovation and devotion is an essential part for the process improvement of an organization. Recently, innovations in the field of engineering help an entrepreneur sell the products through competitive environment. Moreover, the timely delivery of goods and cost effective product is the yardstick, which contributes to the performance index. These improvements resulted from continued performance enhancement efforts, helps in producing right quality in the right times which means providing stability to the organization performance. The role of lean thinking and supply chain characteristics is to create an effective marked on the organizational performance including bonding of all the participants where-so-ever possible. The purpose of this work is to examine the challenges, which integrate the Lean Principles to Supply Chain Characteristics for the real world situation to achieve better utilization of resources, timely delivery to the customer, and deletion of non-value added items including the control on all type of wastages as linked with supply chain systems.

Global supply chains have to manage production over the whole world. Therefore, production plants are needed to supply the demand of products and parts. Due to complication and uncertainty of production market, portfolio selection is one of the most challenging problems. Type-2(T2) fuzzy is a model, which provides the ability to handle the effect of uncertainty. Aiming at this problem, we propose a T2 supplier management system operation scheme, which not only employs fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm by dynamically increasing cluster center, but also it achieves good classification performance. The key result is that fuzzy classification applications improve the planning and operating of supply and demand in a distributed production and global supply chain.

The objective of this study is to measure the performance improvement of supply chain (SC) stages through implementing the national standardization system (NSS) in an innovative way. There are many studies on the positive effects of standardization system on supply chain performance (SCP), but very few studies have measured and prioritized the impact of this system on SCP. This paper introduces a new approach to the performance improvement of each stage of SC through implementing the NSS. First, we use fuzzy analytical hierarchical process method to measure the relative importance of each stage and determine the characteristics of SC. Then, the amount of SC stages improvement after implementing the NSS is determined. Finally, using a combination of results, the stages of SC are ranked according to the effectiveness of NSS implementation. In order to validate the proposed approach, the case analysis of Iran NSS is carried out on broiler SC. The stages of SC are ranked according to the performance improvement through implementing standardization system, subsequently. This approach can be generalized to other standardization systems and SCs.